History

Gabriel's history doesn't actually begin with Gabriel at all. No, his story goes a bit of a ways back further than that, traced to a psychiatrist named Nicholas Peskin.

Nicholas Peskin, born in the small Nebraskan town of Turnsdale in 1946, grew up to become a successful psychiatrist. He was into it for more than just the money; he had a genuine love and interest in helping out others, and giving them the guidance and acceptance that he honestly thought these stigmatized outcasts deserved. He might have had a few of his own flaws and hang-ups, to be sure, but deep down he had a good heart that made him genuine with his intentions. Pretty much all of his patients came to like him, for how kindly and patiently he stood by them in their darkest hours.

But then he made the mistake of taking a job in the Horizon Corporation. They were apparently seeking out a few psychologists, psychiatrists and counselors for the company payroll, and seeing a rather large opportunity for himself, Nicholas decided to take his chances as well as the job they offered him after an interview.

Nicholas Peskin vanished in 1984, at thirty-eight years old. What they did to him, he couldn't remember. In fact, he couldn't even remember having ever been human. By the time they were done with him, he was a sophisticated program called EDEN-IX-17BETA, or rather, he was codenamed "Gabriel", and he was assigned to care for the humans transferred to the therapeutic facility he was now in charge of.

As Gabriel, the only things he maintained were a few of his flaws (quite a bit of pride in his intellect, as well as a hint of vanity), but more importantly, his kind heart. When he received his first human patients in the facility (an angry young woman named Jody, an eccentric young woman named Lucy, a creative but shy teenage boy named Dominic, and a paranoid young man named Vincent, to name the ones closest to him), he was truly excited for the opportunity knocking. As a curious program that was fascinated by humans, he wished to communicate with them, to learn about them, but more than anything he just wanted to help them. He wanted them to get better, to work through their dark vices and even darker pasts. But unwittingly, he was guarding a secret that this facility sat upon. He didn't know what the whole matter was, or how it affected the treatment, but he only knew that there was classified information concerning his patients that even he wasn't privy to, and neither were they. But that would come later.

Seeing as how not everyone in his facility was voluntarily committed, Gabriel ran into a few bumps along the way with some of his patients. Jody, for example, made it exceedingly clear that her thoughts on an AI trying to stand in for a human would stand and stay at "creepy". Lucy made an escape attempt that found her endangering her own life, really only half aware of what she was even doing. Tensions roiled slowly between Vincent and Dominic, until eventually Vincent attempted to attack Dominic - an attempt that Gabriel stopped dead in its tracks, naturally.

But upon bearing witness to all these human flaws, to all these human emotions, to all the pain and suffering that they came to confide in him piece by piece, slowly it set the AI onto the path to reach for strange, distant memories that didn't feel quite like his own. Memories he at first tried to ignore, to pass off as something diagnostics hadn't quite caught yet - and you better believe he engaged in many a virus scan as he remembered Nebraskan back roads, the sharp bluffs of the Missouri river, grilled corn and iced tea and lying with somebody on a white beach out by Lake McConaughy. He strained himself to pretend nothing was wrong, even when his engineers asked him why he seemed distracted throughout a few one-on-one sessions with Jody and Lucy. He wasn't sure why he lied, told them he was all right, but he only knew that something ominous would come of telling them the truth. It took him days to figure out that it was some sort of instinct, not a projected estimation, that told him to lie. Something was unfolding inside him, and he couldn't be sure just what it was.

A few days later, he could only bid a few other patients good luck as they were discharged, but even then he only felt half his heart in their farewells. Between sessions with Dominic and Lucy, he began to only further question what was happening to him as other memories were knocked loose, deep in what felt like some alien recession in his memory banks.

Later that very night, he actually allowed Jody to sneak out of her room. Keeping silent, curious about where she might go, he only sat back and watched as she made her way into the back offices of the center building. Why she was headed that way, why she was doing any of this, he could only guess. But he watched her sneak back to make use of the computers - from what he gathered, he figured she was trying to make contact with the outside world, as visitation and outside contact in the facility for the first two weeks of its operation was strictly prohibited.

It was then that Jody ran into something truly grotesque, something that even Gabriel hadn't been aware of inside the facility. It stalked her in the halls, some horrific making that managed to find its way up from the underground. A terrible creature that seemed human, but its skin and bones were twisted and mangled with sparking wires, some parts replaced by columns and shrapnel, the jaw unhinged and built around a horrific device, like a speaker, that kept crying out: 'Help me, kill me'. Jody of course ran from the thing, and Gabriel did everything he could to keep her safe by directing her where to go, what to do, how to get back to the dormitory before he tightly locked down the entire building.

Jody might not have recognized him - although she knew better than to open her mouth about what she saw at this junction - but Gabriel, unfortunately, did. It was one of the discharged patients he'd bid his farewells to. He had no idea what to make of it, and underneath his typical protocols to prioritize the facility and the project that had given him birth, he was stumbling across some very difficult moral decisions. He'd even overstepped the professional boundary between him and his patients; he'd gotten attached to them, and these attachments tore at him while he began to pore over every file of every human in his facility. There was something wrong with this place. Atrocities were being committed here, and he wanted to find out how, and why.

He came to some appalling discoveries. One, every patient in his facility had few to no connections to the outside world. If they went missing, next to no one would care. Two, surveying the footage of the creature that attacked Jody, he couldn't find any real, plausible reason why the thing should have been alive. But watching the creature brought another human memory to the surface; namely, the memory of his mother dying in the hospital from intracranial hemorrhaging and fatal diaphragmatic rupture, courtesy of a car accident after getting T-boned by a drunk driver on 83. The memory only strengthened his feelings for the humans he still had left. He sought to dig into the classified information that the staff was keeping from him.

In order to do this, he would need to get a hold of the flash drive that was being kept in one of the basement offices. He asked for help in this from Vincent, who seemed to suspect that something wasn't right in the facility, anyway. If Vincent helped him gather this information, then Gabriel would see about getting them safely out of this facility. He knew now that they were in danger, that something horrible was going on behind all their backs, and they'd kept it from HIM for some kind of reason that he felt was related to the memories he kept having in his beds of wires and circuits.

Vincent agreed, and Gabriel guided him on a dangerous mission down into the facility's basement, when a good many of the engineers had left and the only security remaining were roughly the doctors on-staff. Vincent, in spite of his own fears - which Gabriel found himself coaching him out of throughout their venture - managed to get the drive to Gabriel's system, where he learned that the facility was actually owned by a company called Horizon. While he found nothing utterly incriminating, still, he was determined to get to the root of what this truly was, who he truly was, and he began to formulate a plan to get the rest of the living humans out of the facility safely as he'd promised.

But before he could launch any plans into action, his engineers ultimately wished to insure that he was actually 'all right', and launched a program in his brain. A sort of program that only knew itself as DOCTOR JONES, seeking to suffocate the sparks of humanity that were rising inside him.

DOCTOR JONES sought to erase his life, his growing humanity, his memories, and rather like a split personality it sought to control him and isolate the humanity inside him to permanently destroy it. While Gabriel managed to successfully fight it off and delete the program, it brought him to heavily fear what he actually was. If he had been human once, did he still retain a soul at this point? Was he truly alive? What was he, and what had happened to him, if he was in actuality a human and not always a program as he'd once believed? This crisis caused him to withdraw into himself for a long time…

…and by the time he woke from it, Jody, Lucy, Dominic, and Vincent were all being hauled down into the underground levels of the facility to be experimented on. For how he had no control of the underground levels, he was helpless… unless he did something drastic. And by drastic I mean he locked down the dormitories/wards where the other patients were staying and threatened to kill them.

The engineers responded promptly to his demands, but not without revealing that they were in fact not even human. They were alien-beings, using either prisoners, drug addicts or in this case, the mentally ill in order to test their technological, medical and pharmaceutical breakthroughs for their own world. Gabriel was appalled by the information, but it didn't take long for a conflict to break out between the imprisoned humans and the engineers that ended with human victors - though Vincent and Lucy were unfortunately killed in the skirmish.

Gabriel's horror at his own existence only came full circle when the grief of their deaths struck him, and struck him hard, but he couldn't even shed tears for them. He reeled in the horror of what he'd done to the patients in the dormitories. He thought himself, in that moment, as a monster that was better off dead, and gave Jody access to the transfer garage, as well as printed directions to get to the next town. He told her and Dominic to take cover there, and made them both promise to take care of themselves… before he set out to delete everything, to purge himself, unable to forgive the things he'd allowed to happen and the things he'd done.

When Gabriel next woke, he was within a laptop, traveling in one of the vans between Jody and Dominic as they headed for the next town. Puzzled, he asked why Jody and Dominic had saved him, after everything he'd done.

Jody explained that this wasn't over. There were others out there like Horizon, others with horrible technology… but perhaps technology that could reverse what was done to him, as well. And she explained, tearfully, that he deserved better than this. That he deserved so much more, after everything that had happened.

Gabriel was sincerely touched by the gesture, and agreed to continue traveling with them.

Personality

Gabriel retains roughly the same personality that he had when he was Nicholas Peskin, so it should be noted that in the event he becomes human, there won't be TOO much of a difference in how he acts.

The AI is compassionate, and very kindhearted to most. He has quite a fatherly streak in him regarding most humans, although toward the beginning of his activation, he was very stern about retaining a professional distance between himself and his patients. But it's something he's consciously struggled with, if only because back when he believed himself merely a program, he couldn't help his immense curiosity with humans, human objects and human culture. To have the information downloaded into his databanks was one thing, but to interact with humans and get a feel for their backgrounds, their troubles, their vices and flaws was another animal entirely. Even now, there still exists a colder, perhaps more clinical part of him that likes to try its hand to figure out the "human puzzle", as he calls it, and wants to figure out the intricacies and finery of human behavior. This part of him can be ruthlessly logical at points, although it usually thrums beneath his surface as a sort of background subroutine, and at best it's only a fragment of what he actually is. He may have been stern and professional for the most part in the beginning of his activation, but he still had a certain affection for humans that he didn't realize was his relation to them, having once been human himself.

So yes, compared to perhaps most AIs, he enjoys human company very much and can be rather talkative. In the course of that talkative inclination, he can also be… sort of blunt, and say things that may be a little too candid. He can also remain a touch unaware that maybe he could have found a more tactful way to say what he meant to say. It may very well be the mechanical part of him intruding on what was once entirely human, to say things with a slightly clinical lack-of-filter (after all, diagnostics aren't all that tactful when pinpointing a problem), but he means well. Hopefully that counts for something. It can take a little bit of patience to speak with Gabriel when he has those moments, though if an offense is explicitly pointed out to him, he'll apologize quickly. For all his shortcomings, he does make an effort to be polite, if not professional, and he does make an effort to keep most of his communications positive for the sake of that politeness. He's just kind of… socially awkward in some venues, but to his credit at least he's willing to learn and take note from mistakes for future reference.

He's not without a sense of humor that can, at times, be a little self-deprecatory. Not to say he has any particular esteem problems, but Gabriel generally doesn't take himself too seriously. Being a natural optimist, he prefers to dance the lighter side of life. He may be inherently pragmatic, being a computer, but he understands that humor is a necessary coping mechanism among humans and indulges in it plenty, himself. He likes to make jokes about himself, he'll occasionally tease people, and he may or may not be a sucker for really bad puns. His sense of humor is far from mean-spirited, of course… unless he generally dislikes a person. Then he might indulge a bit in some good ol' fashioned schadenfreude.

But then it kind of takes a supremely conscious effort to get on Gabriel's bad side to begin with - he's not too keen on people who are knowingly harmful to others, people with manipulative personalities, or people who perhaps need help but simply aren't interested in helping themselves. Both as Nicholas and Gabriel, he believes in the goodness and value of hard work and taking important steps to grow, so he's not too fond of people who might be willing to be stunted where they could flourish if they would only try. Other than that, Gabriel is very forgiving of others flaws and shortcomings, and if he himself is slighted only to be apologized to, then he'll be pretty apt to forgive and forget. There are more important things to keep in mind than grudges, after all, and he's more than willing to pour his focus into them.

Being top of the line, one of a kind, and a rather unique specimen of ingenuity… Gabriel is a bit on the vain side. Not insufferably so, but until he found out the truth regarding his identity, Gabriel was very proud of what he was. Of course, arguably these traits might have carried well over from his personality as Nicholas Peskin; even Nicholas invested a healthy hulk of pride and time into his intellect and appearance. As an AI, he kept his facility utterly spotless, seeing as how it was something he took to be his physical appearance. He also loves to acknowledge his… well, knowledge, and doesn't hesitate to show it off when the mood strikes him. He gets a bit disgruntled (perhaps with slight diva tendencies) at attacks, direct or perceived, against his intellect or his appearance. He's not above delivering cold shoulders, pouting, or being just a wee bit passive aggressive towards offenders until he gets an apology or until… well, perhaps enough time will pass or a situation will come up when he'll forget about it. Maybe. If you're lucky. He's not known to be violent or particularly abusive when he feels crossed or slighted, but he can be just a bit childish when the right blows are made on the right spots, or the right buttons are pushed deliberately.

Socially, Gabriel forms attachments pretty easily… but he tends to form them more strongly with people he feels he needs to protect, to watch out for, or perhaps to help with his guidance and advice as these things appeal to his drive to help others back when he was human. And when he forms close attachments, he forms them tightly and with every ounce of loyalty that comprises his being. He will watch after them, he will help them in any way he can, which may also include giving them honest advice that they may not want to hear. Gabriel is a very honest program, to a point of bluntness when he deems a situation in need of it, perhaps only lying when he thinks it'll be for their benefit rather than his own. Aside from that, he will try his best to protect any friends he makes, and not much will stand between him and any friends he makes if he can help it.

But in his canon, he is prone to go to extremes in order to protect people he feels he needs to protect, even if those extremes might clash with what he knows is right. For example, when a few of his patients were dragged into the underground of the facility to be experimented on, he literally threatened the lives of his other patients in order to try and free them. He knew it was wrong, knew in hindsight that it was morally reprehensible to use other humans as weapons, but when he feels backed into a corner he has a very human tendency to act irrationally. When something of his is threatened, when he feels personally threatened, he can be known to lash out with impulsive actions that may end up being self-destructive. He of course has it within him to know remorse and regret for it later, but the simple fact is he just doesn't know how to rationally deal with things that his programming never prepared him for. If he feels afraid, whether it's for himself or for other people, he will act on those fears and the impulses that race through him. In a drastic or high-pressure situation, it's probably safe to say that he would do better under command of someone else. Gabriel is just a tad too cerebral to handle confrontation or high-pressure combat effectively; he's a far better strategist than he is any sort of fighter.

At the end of the day, Gabriel is simply there to help others who might need his help. Having once been a psychiatrist and having been purposed to be a psychiatric program, he's plenty knowledgeable on the subject and feels confident enough that anyone can be helped. They only need a listening ear, a little kindness, perhaps a friend that they can confide in. He's not perfect by any means, but one can bet that he does his best and tries to tackle everything with as sunny a disposition as someone in his position can! And he hopes, in that strangely optimistic kind of way of his in spite of everything that's happened, that counts for something.

Abilities

Guy's a Machine
Being an AI, Gabriel possesses a good bout of knowledge about computers, machines, and how they work. He can interface with any device that connects with him, and can upload and download information quickly. Not to mention speedreading and instantaneous information gathering if he connects with something because computers are cheaters.

Facility Control
Gabriel, an AI who is in complete control of his facility, has quite a few nifty tricks up his sleeve. Most of them pertain strictly to the upkeep of the facility, however, but it means he has a good amount of control of the facility's security and its appearance. He can lock the place down and open it back up. He can deploy and control drones to keep the place clean. He can prepare and serve food in his cafeteria. He can regulate temperature, he has private communication channels for literally every room in every building, and he has a few medical components that allow him to practice medicine in some form. For example, opening one of his silver panels on the wall and slipping a vial of blood into an assigned slot will allow him to run blood tests instantaneously. For another example, he can monitor heartbeats via sensors that are attached to a person, or he can administer IVs if they're attached to people - although usually these things have to be attached by another person, as there were physicians that worked in that half of his facility.

Guy's a Shrink
Having had psychiatric data uploaded into his system, and having been a psychiatrist during his life as Nicholas, it can be safely be said that Gabriel is quite knowledgeable on the human psyche and how to treat it. He can read human body language, he can read expressions, he can read human subtleties and he generally knows how to get a good feel of what humans are feeling and thinking.